A quick rise to join top public firms in Mass.

Clean Harbors Inc. CEO Alan McKim led his company past his long-stated goal of clearing $1 billion in revenue back in 2008. Two years later, he set his sights on passing the $2 billion barrier. It had seemed like an ambitious goal at the time.

But with the news on Monday that McKim and his team engineered a $1.25 billion buyout of Safety-Kleen Inc., the Norwell-based environmental services firm is about to enter an entirely different arena.

He now expects to approach the $4 billion-per-year threshold in 2013, if not surpass it. Clearing $4 billion could put Clean Harbors (NYSE: CLH) among the top 10 public companies in the state. Back in 2008, it wasn’t even in the top 25.

Clean Harbors — whose businesses range from running landfills and incinerators to responding to oil spills — achieved this growth trajectory with the help of several well-executed acquisitions that expanded the firm’s geographic reach as well as added new business lines. Organic growth among many of the company’s long-standing operations also played a key role.

A big contributor was Eveready, a Canadian company with some overlapping business lines that also brought Clean Harbors into the oil-field exploration business. In 2009, McKim reached a $400-million-plus deal to buy that company. A couple of smaller acquisitions followed, including the $210 million purchase of Peak Energy Services and the $40 million purchase of Destiny Resource Services last year.

The shopping spree didn’t always go smoothly. A plan to buy Badger Daylighting of Calgary fell apart last year after some of the hydrovac supplier’s shareholders tried to pressure Clean Harbors to raise its offering price for the company.

McKim said he had made some overtures toward Safety-Kleen, which specializes in waste oil recycling, in the past few years about a potential acquisition.

Safety-Kleen was already quite familiar to Clean Harbors executives. Clean Harbors had bought Safety-Kleen’s chemical services division in 2002. A number of former Safety-Kleen employees work at Clean Harbors. And Safety-Kleen is an important customer, responsible for about $15 million to $20 million of Clean Harbors’ revenue each year, McKim said. “For the last 10 years, we’ve done a lot of business together,” McKim said.

Safety-Kleen — which recently relocated its headquarters from Plano to Richardson, Texas — had filed for an initial public offering. But McKim said executives there were still considering a potential buyout that would preclude the IPO.

The purchase, which McKim hopes to complete by the end of the year, will add a number of new services to Clean Harbors’ lineup, including Safety-Kleen’s business of collecting oil waste from small businesses such as auto repair shops. Safety-Kleen is also a leader in oil recycling, and it has two major oil “re-refining” plants — including one in Indiana whose annual throughput of 120 million gallons of year makes it the largest such plant in the world.

The deal combines two powerhouses in the environmental services industry: McKim said Clean Harbors employs about 8,900 people, while Safety-Kleen has about 4,300 workers. Clean Harbors is on track to bring in $2.2 billion in revenue this year, McKim said, while Safety-Kleen expects to generate nearly $1.4 billion.

Clean Harbors predicts at least $20 million in annual savings from the combined companies’ budgets, with only minor job cuts, McKim said. He also plans to keep the Safety-Kleen brand alive after the merger, and to keep the firm’s administrative offices in Texas open. “This is more of a complementary deal than one that has a lot of overlap on costs,” McKim said. “As much as there will be some savings, this is much more of a growth story.”